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Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

Amusingly, the Stackoverflow 503 page has a typo:

  Error 503 Service Unavailable
  Service Unavailable
  
  Guru *Mediation*:
  Details: cache-lon4236-LON 1623146049 854282175
  
  Varnish cache server

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We use Fastly (and our site is down too) but I asked them about this a couple of years ago. It is deliberate. They said it was so they can tell if it is their Varnish service or the customer's Varnish service that is down

This comment is correct. I made that change ages ago. Amused it's still there.

Fastly modified the Varnish error to ensure that it is known if the error is returned by Fastly's Varnish or by the origin's Varnish should the customer run their own Varnish on the origin.

Looks like an error (typo) with Varnish .. it's the same on multiple sites.

Maybe a good way to work out which versions are being used.

Same 503 error message on the actual http://fastly.com/ website

It's interesting because Varnish gets it write in their docs: https://varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/users-guide/troubleshoo...

> It's interesting because Varnish gets it write in their docs

Sorry I couldn't help myself...it's too funny to misspell "right" in a thread about spelling mistakes

;)

Mruphy's Law in action

Isn't it Muphry's Law? Or was that another example :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

this is devolving quickly into an r/something

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27444585

Mediation is a real word though?

That is true, but the typo is because they presumably meant to reference this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

That wiki references the Varnish version.

I think it's an intentional alteration of the original, given the context.

That edit was added after today's fastly outage began.

Even so, mediation makes sense in this context given fastly's business model.

It could be a typo or an attempt to be clever.

...and naturally someone has already updated the page today to include (and highlight) its use and mispelling on Varnish.

Someone (I can't unfortunately due to IP block) needs to change that. The part about the spelling is false, apparently [1] it's an intentional change by Fastly so that they can tell if it's their own Varnish or a customer's Varnish that is throwing an error.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27433139

This seems like it's intentional given the context.

I don't see the typo? definitely a fastly problem though..

Fastly error: unknown domain: numpy.org.

Details: cache-pdk17841-PDK

The typo is "Mediation" instead of "Meditation", I think.

Mediation vs Meditation I think.

I think Varnish uses mediation intentionally though, it was this way 7 years ago when I last used Varnish.

Does not seem like: https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/blob/606977bbf...

According to the Wikipedia page, it is intentional:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

Or did one of you already edit the Wikipedia page to reflect this discussion on hn?

It appears the mention of "Mediation" was made very recently, likely in response to what's currently going on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guru_Meditation&d...

And it seems to be incorrect, since this "spelling variation" is only used by Fastly and not part of Varnish?...

I assume "Guru Mediation" is supposed to be "Guru Meditation", a reference to the way AmigaOS used to describe system failures.

I assumed it was an intentional pun.

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